Last week’s survey on water makers, see the results below, prompted regular contributor Dick Stevenson to reflect on his long experience with desalination aboard a cruising boat. Dick and his wife Ginger are veteran cruisers who have many years of experience living aboard and cruising far and wide on their boat Alchemy. GD
The weekly survey on water makers gets me to suggest what I would do differently after years of living with a high-output device.
I was very happy with my Katadyne 160E (our recent cruising grounds provide lots of good water sources). It never failed me in the 3-5 years it had a lot of steady use and then years of periodic use. It is a no bells and whistles product and does not have a great amps/gal ratio. The former was a plus (bells and whistles have a habit of causing problems) and the amps to gallon ratio was largely unimportant as it ran when the engine or genset was otherwise working and the amp draw was modest in any case. And our water usage is also modest.
What I would do now is to buy two Katadyne 40E units: one for each water tank. Installation should be a doddle as the units are small. Get salt water from “T”ing off the salt water intake lowest in the boat and you are likely getting water from 3-4 feet down and less likely to have petroleum or other contaminants that live closer to the surface. “T” into the fresh water tank through the breather/overflow tube.
Run each unit every other day for an hour (our needs) and you never have to waste water: water coming out immediately will be good. (We did this with our 160E running 1+ hours every 2nd day and water was good from the onset). (Our water usage, for the 2 of us, in tropical waters where we bathed in the ocean was ~~3 gal/day.)
With 2 small units you have redundancy and it ensures that each tank has a dedicated and isolated source.
The units also can be hand pumped in an emergency and taken aboard a raft.
